DeSantis Gunhide Question of the Day: Is There a Suppressor in Your Future?

As this promotional video from Rebel Silencers demonstrates, suppressors have become ever more plentiful and affordable. Their new SOS-22 runs a mere $99. That might make a great stocking stuffer this Christmas if it wasn’t going to take our friends at the ATF until almost Easter to bless the purchase. But for those with patience (and a couple of spare Benjamins for the tax stamp), the price of entry to hearing-friendly fire is rapidly shrinking. Given that, will you be buying one any time soon?

22lr is back on the Walmart shelves. They even had the sub sonic. The wife just bought an SR22 with the threaded barrel. She was tired of plinking with her Glock 43. How can we NOT put a can on that fun little gun.

That last bit annoys me the most. I didn’t have to notify the ATF when I drove from NJ to Texas and back with a trunk full of non-NFA guns and three metric shit tons of ammo, what makes a <16" barreled AR with a can so damn special? Oh wait, that's right, nothing at all to any sane American citizen. Too bad we've got such a dire need for those, eh?

Suppressors are exempt from the notification requirement to transfer them across state lines – which is one of the reasons why people pin and weld suppressors to a SBR-length barrel.

At that point, the suppressor is considered part of the barrel and should put the SBR-length barrel over a 16″ OAL – which effectively creates a one-stamp integrally suppressed SBR they can transport across state lines without notifying the ATF.

The notification requirement only applies to SBRs, SBSes, MGs, AOWs and DDs.

That makes for an interesting idea if you are willing to pay fedzilla $200 for a suppressor tax stamp:
(1) Acquire suppressor tax stamp.
(2) Acquire suppressor.
(3) Acquire AR-15 barrel. Do NOT attach that new barrel to a lower receiver.
(4) Shorten barrel to desired length such that the barrel plus suppressor are greater than 16 inches.
(5) Attach and pin/weld suppressor to short barrel.
(6) Attach barrel with integral suppressor to AR-15 lower receiver.

Unless I am missing something, this enables you to make what would otherwise be a short-barreled rifle without having to acquire a tax stamp for the short-barreled rifle. (You don’t have to acquire a short-barreled rifle tax stamp because you never actually had a short-barreled rifle since the barrel length consists of the barrel proper plus suppressor.)

Note: it might be a good idea to remove any AR-15 lower receivers (including lower receivers that are part of fully functional rifles) from your home before you shorten that barrel to less than 16 inches lest fedzilla be able to claim that you had “constructive possession” of a short-barreled rifle (having all the components necessary to make a rifle).

Of course, if you have an AR-15 lower receiver that has gone through any necessary processes to become a handgun lower, then having a short barrel would not be a problem since you could claim that short barrel corresponds to the lower receiver which is designated a handgun. By the way someone should illustrate that insanity in a simple video so that we can show the world how stupid the handgun, short-barreled rifle, and rifle laws are in our country.

Several customers who bought cans in February, submitting paperwork by 01 March had brought me their rifles for muzzle threading. By June, they were getting antsy when I was behind in getting their work done. OK, so I took a week and knocked them all out, one after the other, got their rifles back to them, got paid.

Here it is, October and I’ve asked all of these customers in the last week if they’ve gotten their tax stamp. Not one of them has. Some of them have trusts, some are direct ownership. All of them said the ATF cashed the check or put the charge on the card within three weeks of their mailing off the form(s).

Our local SOT told me this week that he’s receiving estimates from the ATF that if you send in your paperwork this coming week, you might get your tax stamp back by February ’17. Funny, the ATF was quoting four months this past February, and here we are, seven+ months later and people are still waiting for tax stamps.

Buying? No. Manufacturing my own to save money? Maybe, if I find the time and inclination to go through that process.

Anybody with access to a lathe can make a suppressor, so why the BATFE still sees the need to take all the time to do whatever background checks when they have more important work to do beats me. Hey, if the Border Patrol and the rest of the federal government won’t enforce immigration law, why bother enforcing the suppressor law? If people want to work around it, they can just turn out their own custom made suppressor in their garage and no one would know about it.

Tracking down all those Fast and Furious guns, tracking down all the Muslims who are buying pressure cookers and copper wire, and making sure horrible, evil, despicable, deplorable people aren’t selling loosies on the streets without charging a tobacco tax.

Just sayin. If a guy needs a silencer – they’re only an oil filter away. Since they are so easy available and inherently have no victim, why even have it a law? Also, if someone is intent on committing murder (a crime with steep penalties), and wanted it quieter, why would they care about some silencer law.

Meanwhile, my earmuffs are a lot cheaper than a $200 dollar tax stamp. Not paying $200.

Lol. There are thousands of aliens bragging about their illegal status on social media and on television. There are pictures of rioters and Trump supporter bashers on youtube who face no consequences. I don’t think law and order is a priority for America right now.

Let’s be serious: At this point, Obama is worrying about tee times for next spring. He’d be more interested in arresting a greenskeeper who bungled his reservation than enforcing any part of his actual, you know, job.

What, exactly, needs to be ‘redone’ on your trust? Nothing. The only difference, now, from before, is that the ‘responsible people’ listed on the trust have to have photos and fingerprints taken and submitted. Nothing has to be changed on the trust.

Need 30 cal can for 300 bo and a 9mm can (either integral from srt arms or an over barrel 9mm can from AMTAC for a super short pdw plinker).

That rebel is tempting, had an email deal from them lest week for that can for $79. I’d I’ve bought one if they weren’t so new to the market. The look good but ill let some other guys in on it first to works out any possible bugs.

The entry price is not really going down. $200 for a tax stamp, if you want to set up a trust that’s an extra 100-500, want to have more that one person on the trust list then everyone of them have to be fingerprinted (at an approved location no less) or in my case I have to buy another safe because I can’t even get my wife to go to the range let alone fill out paperwork to get on a trust. so while the product itself may be inexpensive the cost is still there, just going to uncle Sam and not the people who actually do the work.

with all that I still see a suppressor in my future or at least I would like to see one, most likely it will be a pipe dream as the time, money and effort will be spent elsewhere.

More than one ‘responsible’ person on the trust… Read the rules closely. A ‘responsible’ person is one who can

“In the case of a TRUST, those persons with the power or authority to direct the management and policies of the trust include any person who has the capability to exercise such power and possesses, directly or indirectly, the power or authority under any trust instrument, or under State law, to receive, possess, ship, transport, deliver, transfer, or otherwise dispose of a firearm for, or on behalf of, the trust.”

Unless you give other people that kind of power, they’re not ‘responsible’ persons in the trust. I, personally, am the only person with that power in my trust, so I’d be the ONLY one that is required to submit fingerprints. I have several subordinate trustees, but they aren’t delegate ANY power except to use the items, and that doesn’t make them ‘responsible’. I think ATF still had a little common sense in this law, in that they made ME the RESPONSIBLE PERSON for my equipment, and to ensure that only legal people are allowed to use my stuff.

Illegal EO’s aside, she can’t change the price. The reason the price has never changed is because it’s written into the NFA, which requires an act of Congress to change.

Back when the NFA went into effect you could get a Remington pump shotty from Sears for $12 through the mail. The whole idea was to price people out of the market. The side effect of inflation has been that $200 isn’t a King’s ransom any more. Congress didn’t foresee that when they wrote the law.

We enter $200 in 1934 dollars, and ask it to adjust to today… and we get $3,594 and change.

From having talked with plenty of people who remembered the Depression, they told me that back then $5 would buy all the groceries a family could eat in a couple weeks. Most people didn’t make $3K in a year of work.

As you said, it was put into the law to erect a barrier for the little people.

I “bought” the can from a gun store here in Colorado, filed my paperwork and waited. The application came back as denied almost 10 months to the day later. The ATF nitpicked the way my trust was written and said it wasn’t valid in Colorado. So I called up the lawyers that drafted my trust and they advised me that they believed the ATF was wrong but fighting them wasn’t worth it and would take years in court and tens of thousands of dollars even if I was successful, which they obviously couldn’t guarantee.

So I had the can transferred to a store down in NM that I had done business with before. The dealer-to-dealer transfer is supposed to be fast and it is compared to a transfer to a serf like me, it only took three months.

After that I did another Form 4 with that store and waited another 8 months for approval. In total 18 months before I was approved. At that point my life was busy enough that I couldn’t drive down to Burque to pick the thing up so I had to wait on my dad to go get it for me and then ship it to me.

From the time I paid for that muffler until the time it was in my hand ended up being something like 20 months.

The moral of the story: I have shit luck with the ATF processing my paperwork. Whenever they give an estimated time for processing I automatically add 30% to it. This other can I have was *supposed* to take ~7 months, it took 11. I don’t know who I pissed off in the NFA branch but they hate me over there.

Even if NFA went away, I refuse to pay on the order of $1,000 for a metal can with some internal dividers and a threaded hole. The materials for a suppressor cost on the order of $5 and the manufacturing cost cannot be much beyond $15 if produced in batches of 1000 or more. If suppressors were in the neighborhood of $60 (and Congress repealed NFA), I would purchase a few. Until then, no way.

Actually a modern silencer costs a hell of a lot to design and produce because they’re not a commodity item.

The companies spent a ton on design and even more tooling up to make the thing and they don’t sell a lot of them in relation to the price of production. Then there’s all the licensing. Their profit equation has some pretty big numbers in it.

It’s also not as simple as just a tube with baffles and a hole through it because a modern silencer is effectively meant to last forever. With the old ones, you went through all the crap we do now and you got something that would last for maybe 500 rounds before it wore out. Many only lasted around 200.

If you have misalignment with the exit hole even slightly with a rifle silencer you just made a small bomb for the end of your rifle. Rifle suppressors come with explicit warnings that they are dangerous if misaligned and that the threading on your rifle being off even slightly can cause serious injury or death.

Way too much liability on that. One idiot blows up a can and the company is screwed.

You should see how much tooling I have just to thread a muzzle for a suppressor competently. Let’s see:

– Ideal thread pitch measurement wire sets for the specific threads, $170 a set.
– Range rods, so allow me to align the barrel bore perfectly (to less than 0.0005″) with the axis of the lathe. Those are about $70 a set.
– A special digital micrometer that as resolution in the 10’s of millionths of an inch, which allows me to actually start believing the 10ths of a thousands reading on the mic. That was about $250.
– Ground strike-check rods that get slipped down the bore to verify that there won’t be a baffle strike after I’m done. Those are precision ground, and about $70 a pop.

Right there, I’d reckon that, for all the various barrels I’ve been threading, my tooling for the most common cans I thread (.22LR, .223, .308 and 6.5) is over $1K – not including the lathe, cutting tools or anything else. Just alignment and thread measurement tools.

All of this is made necessary by the fact that if your alignment shoulder on a barrel is not perpendicular to the bore axis by 0.0015 or less, you could get a baffle strike as the bullet is exiting some cans that have very little annular clearance between the bullet – like .020 or less. Work a little trig and you see that just slapping some of these cans on a barrel can result in Bad Things happening.

No offense but it’s not that easy. Companies like TBAC, SilencerCo and Gemtech make it look easy the way an Olympic gymnast makes gymnastics look easy.

A sealed can, like say my TBAC, is welded. That’s gotta be a near flawless X-ray quality weld on stainless. I used to do those kind of welds. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to do. There are two ways to get it done. You can hire a TIG welder, who isn’t going to come cheap for this sort of work, or you can buy a machine that will do it for you. That machine will cost millions of dollars. The last one I used cost the company I was working for $16.5 million and it took forever to get it up and running with the right programs. Even then it needed a babysitter.

Non-sealed rifle and pistol cans are ever more delicate to make. The pressures they contain are enormous. To make one and make it safely you need to have a crazy inspection process and X-ray the thing repeatedly because a flaw in the metal can cause a catastrophic failure. That’s not cheap. but it’s especially important with aluminum cans like the Osprey from SilencerCo. These things are not Mag-Lite bodies and washers. Can you do that? Yes. Is it wise? No. Will it last? Probably not. I won’t say that it will hurt you but there’s a pretty good chance it will and you don’t want to show up in the ER with bits of metal in your face and then have to explain yourself to the BATFE.

Again, no offense but saying making a can, especially one for a rifle, looks easy is pretty much analogous to saying “Hold my beer and watch this”. See the I posted above. That’s what you get when you make thing thing at home unless you’re a very skilled designer and machinist capable of following pretty exacting tolerances. You’ll also likely need to be a skilled welder.

I’m sure you can have crappier welds if you use thicker material. I’m sure one can make a cheap and effective silencer at the cost of weight and/or longevity, without TIG, radiographic testing, dye penetrant testing, mag particle, or Ultrasonic waves, yet still be better than an oil filter. In fact, if it’s thick enough, you probably don’t need any welding at all – just thread it on.

I’m certainly not suggesting one I would build would be better than the one made by manufacturer’s who do nothing but design and build silencers all day.

Several “universal silencers” are on the market now, including the SilencerCo Hybrid handle anything from 45-70 down to .223, including all of the common rounds such as 45acp, 9mm, .308, .223, etc. That being said, a jack of all trades is a master of none…

In that all NFA items (and the .50 BMG) are banned under California state law, and with a democrat majority (mostly from the large urban centers) in control of the Legislature, such that the law will never change, that would be a “No.”

Question, let’s assume it’s 1933 and I want a suppressor.
I stop at the local bolts&guns hardware store and give them $2 for a Maxim Silencer for my .45ACP Thompson.
How effective is the Maxim (can I shoot without hearing protection), and how long will it last?

Oops, looks like what I heard about $2 Maxims wasn’t true, or didn’t apply to the 1930s.
Let’s say I want a suppressor for my ’03 Springfield and I pay $8.50 for the government model Maxim, can I shoot 30/06 without hearing protection and will it fall apart in 1000 shots?

Looking into a M4-2000, Ti-RANT 9 and Ti-RANT 45 next year, along with another SBR (10″ FN SCAR 16S) and a DD (M203). Currently waiting on two eForm 1s for a 10.5″ PA-9 AR and a 12″ Remington 870 12 gauge.

NO ! I do not understand the need. What is the advantage to making a rifle significantly longer and front heavy ? Any hunting situation in which the report of the rifle impacts others to the extent that suppression is needed puts you in a place where using a rifle is unacceptable in such close confines, and very likely against the law. As for handguns ,severely impacting the ability to conceal the weapon negates any advantages. Unless we all become snipers or 00 secret agents, I cannot see a feasible need.

There are already suppressor kits available where you just drill the hole
You file an ATF form 1 since you are making an NFA item and not just transferring one on a form 4
You pay the same amount of
$200
I have shot a friends home made suppressor, not a kit
Works great on his sbr AR 15!
100% legal with tax stamps
Cost him $200 in parts and a $200 tax stamp plus his time

Most any kit or home-shop made silencer will a) work, but b) not work as well as the modern cans made with CFD simulation, tight annular gaps, etc.

If someone wants to make a improvised silencer, that’s cool, but for the expense and the efficiency, it is difficult to beat the “solvent trap + oil filter” method. Sure, it’s huge, ungainly, etc, but you can get filters for hydraulic systems that are longer and smaller in diameter than the typical GM 350 V-8 oil filter one sees used on many of these jobs. And if you get it misaligned on the muzzle, hey, you’re out what, $15?

What one is paying for in modern silencers is the durability, the efficiency of noise reduction, and the lightness of weight. Some of the titanium cans out there are quite remarkably light and efficient, for example.